


Star Wars: A Distant Fear

by Magnanimator



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rise of Empire Era - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Prequel Re-Write
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-15 03:48:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5770069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magnanimator/pseuds/Magnanimator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Full-scale reimagining of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. </p><p>Attempting to craft grandiose space opera here. Love! War! Intrigue! Betrayal! Tragedy on the grandest scale!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fanfare

Doom comes slowly to the Old Order. 

For a thousand generations, the Republic has stood. It is order amid chaos, a last shining beacon in the dark. A trillion suns, a million worlds, races and peoples and tongues beyond counting. All voices are welcome in the Galactic Senate, and all quarters can call upon the protection of the powerful and mysterious Jedi Knights. 

War, famine and plague have each tested the Republic's resolve, and each has been found unequal to it. The Republic is too mighty to be felled by any blow, commanding all the ingenuity and courage of a hundred quadrillion citizens. It will endure until the end of time; vast, ever-changing and eternal. 

Or so it would appear. 

In the Outer Rim, the Jedi Order wages an eternal war against pirates, slavers, crime-lords and rogues. In the Senate, wealth and power corrupt as they always must. In the teeming Core Worlds, the troubles of the Galaxy are forgotten amid the never-ending demands of high society and galactic industry. Ambition lurks in every salon and caprice behind every manicured hedge. In the darkest, wildest places of the Galaxy, danger stirs. 

Above the Outer Rim world of Quen, the end begins.


	2. Prologue I: Knights of the Old Republic

The ship lurches through the upper atmosphere of Quen, trailing smoke. 

She is a slaver dreadnought named _Ugragayah_ , black and ragged and vast. She doesn't belong here. The smoke twists and knots in her wake, for it is blood in the water. 

Smaller ships circle above her, pelting her with lasers, with torpedoes, with everything they have. Thick beads of light pulse from cruiser turrets and destroyer guns. Corvettes slide through, volley their ordnance, and retreat behind the bulk of the cruisers to rearm and regroup. Fighters are a heat-haze in the air, swooping and strafing with their blasters. The _Ugragayah_ replies from dwindling batteries as missiles and rockets and bombs burst against her jagged armor. 

_Ugragayah_ is a Huttese word. It has no direct translation into galactic-standard Basic. 

The nearest one can get is _Ravenous_.

The Republic is not a crude entity. Not every projectile it launches is meant to explode. Boarding torpedoes crash through the hull, ejecting rank upon rank of security droids into the holds and corridors. Dropships swoop low, teams of Judicial Forces commandos leaping out with grapnel lines and jump-packs. Chaff and jammers flair in every direction. A running light-fight erupts in the upper decks and on the hull, pirates and slavers clambering out of the airlocks to blast at the attackers swarming insect-like across their ship,

The air is still to thin to breathe, but it would smell of smoke and ash. 

Two men leap from a streaking dropship. They wear neither harness nor jetpack. They land, gracefully, and roll ten meters across across the deck before they rise. The Judicial Forces troopers around them are armored brightly in red enamel, but they wear only brown. They throw off their cloaks and ignite their light-sabers. 

One blue, one green, glimmering faintly against the blackened hull. 

The two Jedi cut their way through an airlock hatch and swing down into the dreadnought's interior. The elder of them cuts down two pirates with a single flash of his blade, and they make their way along the corridor. The younger of them pauses and holds up his hand. 

“I sense a stirring in the Force.” says Obi-Wan Kenobi. 

His master peers at him, one eyebrow raised. At the end of the corridor, a heavily-armed pirate bursts through the hatch. Then sees them and turns back. 

“Something incredibly improbable is about to happen.” Obi-Wan clarifies. “Not far from here.”

His master lowers the eyebrow. 

“You are always sensing disturbances in the force, my padawan.” says Qui-Gon Jinn. 

“True.”

“Let us be on our way. Perhaps we can investigate after we have dealt with the Captain."

Outside, the battle goes well. The Judicial Forces have set a net across a dozen star-systems, partnering with four regional navies to bolster their numbers. Now that their quarry is caught, the net closes. More warships and more troops jump in by the minute, powering toward Quen at maximum speed. The ships of the Quenian navy lie broken out beyond the silver moons, but their army launches missiles and antique fighters from hidden bunkers beneath the mountains and hills. The _Ravenous_ is besieged from above and below, her engines disabled and her hull breached in three dozen places

It won't be long now. 

Obi-Wan follows his master deeper into the dark, winding corridors.


	3. Prologue II: Promise

The pirate ship's number-three axial gunnery deck runs for two hundred meters along the upper starboard hull, filled with the thunder of recoil systems and the fizzle of overloaded coolant lines. It would be filled with the cursing of the gunners, too, but their words get lost in the pipes and the hollow spaces between machine-sounds. They take wrong turns, run together, emerge in unexpected places.

Another thing that gets lost is the patter of little feet amid the maintenance trenches and access tunnels that cross here and there beneath the deck. 

The boy wants to run. He wants to hide, wants to scream, wants to do anything except stay at his post, switching out power core after power core so the guns can fire again and again. He can't stop. A blaster shot from further along the line reminds him of what happens to gun-slaves who do. He pulls a lever and ejects a spent core. Reaches inside, re-sets the capacitors with a twist of his fingers. Pulls the next lever. 

Aboard the _Ugragayah_ , slaves are cheaper than servo-droids. 

The power core steams on the deck, glowing red. Ventilation fans sputter. Coolant drizzles from a thousand tiny leaks. Pools of oily lubricant reflect the dim overhead lights. There is no time to clean up. 

The boy isn't paying attention when the missile ricochets into the gunnery deck. He has his head and shoulders inside a bank of plasma batteries, trying to isolate a problem in the ionization matrix while an assistant gunner keeps a blaster trained on the back of the head. That blaster has already been used to kill one slave, a girl who couldn't fix the problem fast enough. 

She was always slow. Not like him.

He pauses at the eerie silence that falls over the deck. The blaster has drifted away from him as the pirate stares at something further along the gunnery deck. None of the guns are firing. He levers himself partway out of the maintenance trench to look. 

A hundred pirates and a hundred slaves stand around, staring at a blunt cylinder that has crashed through a hole in the overhead plating. The breach is already sealed by atmospheric shields. The cylinder blinks, red. 

“Maybe it's a dud...” somebody ventures. The boy knows it isn't. He drops back down into the trench and curls into a ball, covering his ears. 

Less than four seconds later, he is the only living being left in the gunnery deck. 

.o.O.o.

The Jedi sweep into the ruined gunnery deck, the hems of their robes drifting through ash and smoke and blood. 

“What happened here?” Qui-gon wonders. The older Jedi stands poised at the edge of the devastation, looking out across the tangle of wreckage and limbs, reluctant to proceed. A great many people have died here. Such moments always deserve respect, even from him. 

Obi-wan, on the other hand…

The younger Jedi heads straight across the shattered deck plating, picking his way through debris and checking bodies as he goes. His course is unwavering. 

“There was a deflection shot through a weak point in the armor belt.” Obi-wan explains. Of the two, he has always had a better head for these matters. “The atmospheric shields must have contained the blast. It was channeled along the gun deck and caused secondary explosions as it went.” 

Qui-gon simply watches as his padawan gets further and further away, further and further into the thicket of ruin. Obi-wan's voice sounds light, distracted. Inappropriate for the circumstances. 

“Obi-wan, what are you doing?”

“Whatever I sensed earlier...this place was the focus of it.”

The padawan pauses at the edge of some jagged shadows. Layers of bulkhead plating have collapsed here, toppling over and into a logistics trench. 

“There's a survivor here.”

“Nothing could have survived this.” Qui-gon says. 

“It's incredibly improbable,” Obi-wan agrees. 

Qui-gon knows that his padawan has a tendency toward smugness. He has witnessed it many times, when Obi-wan bested some lesser student on the dueling square or trapped an inattentive instructor in a falsehood. Normally there would be a crooked grin, an indulgent glow in the Force at being proven right. Now there is only detachment as the young Jedi focuses on lifting the debris. 

“Be careful,” the older Jedi cautions. His padawan does not reply for a moment, then stands back. 

“It's a child.” 

Qui-gon picks his own way through the debris, moving to stand alongside Obi-wan. The child is a boy, remarkably undamaged given the scale of the violence surrounding them. He is scrawny, undernourished, his hair the color of dusty thatch. Now Qui-gon, too, can feel eddies in the Force, just now dying away in the corners of this place. Ripples of such power can only be caused by an event of profound intensity. The feeling unnerves him.

“Perhaps he is the Chosen One.” Qui-gon jokes. The words sound hollow amid the dead, and he regrets them immediately. 

Obi-wan shoots him an annoyed glare. “You are always finding Chosen Ones, master.” 

“True.” 

They stand together for a moment longer, peering at the boy. They are interrupted by the harsh wailing of the ship's klaxons. There is an urgency in the sound that Qui-gon has never heard before.

“What is happening?” Qui-gon asks. 

“They're overloading the reactors. They want to scuttle the ship!” 

Qui-gon contemplates this, considers his actions. He takes all into account before he makes a decision. It doesn't take long. 

“I will go to the engineering decks and delay them. You take this boy, evacuate as many slaves and Republic troops as you can, and get off the ship. I will join you once everybody is safe.”

“Master...”

“I will join you,” Qui-gon repeats. “Once everybody is safe.”

.o.O.o.

Qui-gon has not reappeared by the time Obi-wan bustles the last of the freed slaves into the pirates' heavy shuttles. He has not reappeared by the time the last Judicial Forces assault ship detaches from the burning dreadnought. He has not reappeared by the time Obi-wan clambers into the last escape pod, the unconscious boy draped over his shoulder, and jettisons it with seconds to spare. 

He has not reappeared by the time the reactors detonate, and Obi-wan has to look away or be blinded by the glare.


End file.
